Hat tip goes to an ACT! email. Sign up here to receive them. Note especially the line “Jihad is my spirit.”

The MSA’s “Pledge” is based on the creed of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Allah is our objective, The Prophet is our leader, Qur’an is our law, Jihad is our way, Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

So those nice, smart young Muslims you know from your High School—and I believe you when you tell me that they wouldn’t hurt a fly—they will go to college. And when they do, they most likely will associate with other Muslims and Muslim groups including the Muslim Student Association. And they will be influenced by this rhetoric to some degree, unless they outrightly reject it. But rejecting a message of victimhood might be hard, especially in the university environment where victimhood is held in high esteem and anti-Christian and anti-Israel messaging abounds. So the question I have is what will counter-balance these messages? I don’t see any other Muslim student groups stepping up. Enlighten me if I am uninformed.

Here’s the tragic story of a young Baptist man, Carlos Bledsoe, recruited and brainwashed by Islamic radicals and trained to commit murder in the name of Allah on American soil. Melvin Bledsoe’s testimony was dismissed as “anecdotal” by Democrats during the Homeland Security Hearing on Radicalization.

I would merely say this to those espousing the dismissive viewpoint that this is anecdotal: let people decide for themselves. Couple this anecdote with non-anecdotal statistical evidence about which major world-wide religion does this and let the picture emerge. There is radicalization and Jihad taking place on American soil, and your children may be targeted.

We look forward to reading The Fight of Our Lives, the new book by William J. Bennett and his radio show producer, Seth Leibsohn. In anticipation, we greatly appreciate this CNN special article about the overstatement of anti-Muslim bigotry in the media and as a result, in popular perception. Here’s are several excerpts from the article with my comments, but I hope you have a chance to read the entire thing.

Let’s start with the national numbers: 8.4 percent of religious hate crimes in America were anti-Muslim in 2009 (the most recent date for which statistics are available). By contrast, that same year, nearly 72 percent of religious hate crimes in America were anti-Jewish (Muslims in America faced 107 incidents of bias in 2009; Jews faced 931).

This pattern has remained fairly consistent over the past decade. For example, in 2002, 10.5 percent of the religious bias crimes in America were anti-Muslim while 65% were anti-Jewish; in 2006 (just to pick another post- 9/11/2001 year), 11.9 percent of the religious bias crimes in America were anti-Muslim while 65.4 percent were anti-Jewish. (It is worth noting here that exact statistics on the Muslim population in America are hard to assess — estimates range from 2.6 million to 7 million, a number President Obama cited — the Jewish population is generally agreed upon at about 6.5 million.

I’ve spoken to several people recently who simply won’t be bothered with these facts. To them, anyone who is concerned about the goals and aims of Jihadis is a backwater bigot. They choose feelings over facts, and ignore the truth that there are far more incidents of Jew-hatred than Muslim-hatred in our country.

Of course each and every hate crime is horrific, and we wish there were zero hate crimes in America, but the larger point is important for context. If a radio host or some cable commentator or U.S. senator said, “The United States discriminates against Jews” or “Jews have a particularly hard time in the United States” or, “There is a lot of anti-Jewish bigotry in America,” it would simply not comport with most people’s — or most Jewish Americans’ — understandings of 21st century America. And yet, we accept at face value the storyline of wholesale anti-Muslim bigotry in America.

Some have suggested that the numbers for these supposedly anti-Muslim incidents are skewed upwards since pamphlets distributed by CAIR instruct police departments to report any crime committed against a Muslim to the FBI as a hate crime, whether religion affected the perpetrator’s motive or not. That wouldn’t surprise me, but even so, the numbers are still tiny. These facts support our claim that many Muslims use the victim card to intimidate goodhearted Americans. Subsequently they strengthen us in our resolve to “throw political correctness in the garbage can,” an action which Brigitte Gabriel has often declared to be a necessary one if we are to effectively fight and win this struggle.

Indeed, the Muslim experience in America is an interestingly supportive one, especially in our post-9/11 world. In 2008, Americans elected a president with an Arabic name and whose father had been born a Muslim — and in higher numbers than in several previous presidential elections: Barack Obama received 53 percent of the vote in 2008, George W. Bush received 51 percent of the vote in 2004, and Bill Clinton received 49 percent of the vote in 1996.

Another example of a lack of widespread anti-Muslim bias is the fact that in 2010, a Muslim and Arab woman, Rima Fakih, was chosen as Miss USA. Indeed, it appears more in the Muslim community had a problem with Ms. Fakih’s crowning than did the rest of the American community. And most recently, a CNN poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans said they would be OK with a mosque in their community and that “positive views of Muslim Americans are on the rise.” It is also worth noting that nearly 700 mosques have been built in America over the last decade.

Hard facts to ignore—yet many will do so preferring their world-views based on moral equivalency.

Still, an uncomfortable fact remains, but it is not about bigotry. Despite the full and equal rights Muslims are and should be entitled to in America, we face a problem that too few are willing to speak about: Radical Muslims have declared war on America, from within and without, and that threat is on the rise. This uncomfortable fact has put many Americans on the defensive. But most of those on the defensive are those who recite this fact, not those who avoid it.

Well stated, Dr. Bennett and Mr. Leibsohn. It’s interested almost to a comic degree how many pro-Islam links are embedded between the paragraphs in this story. CNN deserves credit for running the piece, even if it is a paid ad from Bennett/Leibsohn’s publishing company.

This is over a year old, yet still pertinent. The absurd notion that the radical followers of a violent killer are to be compared with the fans of Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley is one example of how the “reasoning” of the apologists of Islam is weak and untried. Islam is best spread by the sword, and has only been spread by the sword from its very beginnings.

Note also this disciple’s particular silencing technique: “Why? why? why? why? why? why? why?…..” He filibusters instead of answering the points. There is a complete lack of confidence in his own ability to counter the questions raised.

Here’s an excerpt from the very informative yet succinct 48-page book Sharia Law for Non-Muslims. I advise everyone to purchase a copy–I always have copies at our chapter meetings. This excerpt shows how from its beginnings Islam was utterly unconvincing unless forced on populations via the threat of violence.

In Mecca, Mohammad was a religious preacher who converted about 10 people a year to Islam. In Medina, Mohammad was a warrior and politician who converted about 10,000 people to Islam every year. Politics and jihad were a thousand times more effective than religion to convert the Arabs to Islam. If Mohammad had not taken to politics and Jihad, there would only have been a few hundred Muslims when he died and Islam would have failed. The religion of Islam was a failure but politics combined with religion was a total success.

The book then shows 2 supporting graphs. One shows the contrast between the growth in the 13 years Mohammad spent teaching Islam in Mecca and the 10 years he spent in Medina until his death. The other shows how of all the passages devoted to jihad in the Islamic trilogy (Koran, Hadith and Sira), none of these passages appear in the Meccan Koran, i.e., that part of the Koran written while Mohammad resided in Mecca. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Hans A. von Spakovsky explains why the decision of Judge Micki Miles-LaGrange to rule against the will of the voters with regard to the Oklahoma Sharia Ban employs bad reasoning and leads to a faulty conclusion. To me, this paragraph touches the crux of the issue:

That difference is illustrated by an example. If a mortgage lender wants to structure a mortgage for a Muslim in order to satisfy certain Islamic principles prohibiting interest, the lender can certainly do so by writing the contract terms accordingly. But if a lawsuit is filed over the mortgage, the deal will be construed according to applicable state and federal mortgage and contract laws.

Emphasis is mine. You can write civil contracts however you would like them to be written to suit your belief system. That’s the beauty of our American court system. If I as a Catholic want to specify in my last will and testament that $1,000.00 should be contributed as stipends for Catholic Priests to celebrate Masses for the repose of my soul, then this wish will be carried out. It doesn’t matter that the judge may be an atheist, my lawyer is a Protestant and the laws of the land say nothing about the matter of life after death and the value of the sacraments of the Roman Catholic church.

Thus generations of religious people in America since the founding have not found the laws of the land insufficient to give them the freedom and legal protection to practice their respective religions. Our legal system even makes accommodations in the legal process for different belief systems. For example, for witnesses who do not believe they should “swear” an oath in court, they may make an “affirmation” instead, basically the same promise to tell the truth with different wording. But we don’t believe in having a different set of laws for people holding different beliefs. And most of us find the insinuation that our laws tacitly discriminate against Muslims because they do not enshrine the teachings of Islam to be insulting and wrongheaded.

If anyone says that Sharia Law must be recognized officially to have binding force by the Federal Government and State Governments, then they are saying something which totally goes against the way the American legal system is set up and has been accepted by people of all religions since the beginning of the country. The official recognition of Sharia is what the Islamists are pushing for and it is what we, standing with the Oklahomans who passed the Sharia Ban, are against. This is not an accommodation which any American should support.